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Reporter Tina Hesman E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 314-340-8325
* A St. Louis physicist has created a computer program called the Creativity Machine that simulates what goes on in the human brain. It has invented new products, composed music, coined new words and frightened some who fear such self-aware machines could take over the world.
Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.
Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all those things, but he's really just "the man behind the curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.
What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in a box," said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.
"His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!"
Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.
Others say it is something far more sinister -- the beginning of "Terminator" technology, in which self-aware machines could take over the world.
Thaler's technology was born from near-death experiences of dying computer programs. Its foundation is the discovery that great ideas are the result of noisy neurons and faulty memories.
The invention began to take shape in the 1980s. By day, the physicist worked at McDonnell Douglas Corp., where he wielded a powerful laser beam to crystallize diamonds. He built elegant computer simulations, called neural networks, to guide his experiments.
But at night, things were different. Shirley MacLaine and her ilk were all over the TV and on magazine covers talking about reincarnation and life after death and near-death experiences. It made Thaler wonder: "What would happen if I killed...